Concept and creative process
Opening titles for the long-running talk show, in which Michael Parkinson conversed with a series of celebrity guests. In a 3D computer animation live clips of previous celebrity guests were coloured blue and sepia and placed on the facets of rotating tumbling blocks. The blocks were laid down in long strips to form a mosaic of sepia images which, as the virtual camera angle widened and rotated, became pixels in a still portrait of Parkinson, before dissolving through to a full colour image with the logo beneath. The 3D animation was created by former BBC designer Chris Fynes at Infynity. He had computed the previous ‘Parkinson’ titles for designer Bernard Heyes and the idea with the second title was to produce a much more sophisticated version of the first, this time introducing live action of Parkinson’s previous guests on every facet of the animating blocks. Chris Fynes recalls the work: “It was an indulgent ray-trace as every field rendered had to call up the appropriate fields of all the live action shots used, but then I always liked programming complicated stuff! This is one of the advantages of writing code as opposed to using a package. The tonal balance of each shot was the result of an initial program that I wrote to match as closely as possible its final position on Parkinson’s face”. These titles were used with minor alterations in the animation for some four years or more.